A well known problem exists with regard to message greetings. One has to individually administer greetings for each message type, e.g., voice recordings for voice greetings and text for email, Instant Messaging, etc. This problem is worsened by the fact that some users change their greeting to customize the greeting for the day and date. Further, messages that show the user as busy or out of the office can further add time to the process. Out-of-Office greetings are also typically customized to include dates of absence, date of return, etc. In addition, there may be company policies to enforce regarding the content for such greetings. Exacerbating these problems is the popularity of participation in blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, and other social media and the inability to extend greetings outside of the current voice and email paradigms.
Specifically, there is no way currently to extend calendar information, greetings, and/or Out-of-Office information to certain types of social networks. Some of these social media are passive, e.g., they require the user to navigate a browser and/or login to a service. Another characteristic of these passive social networks are that a user will not necessarily receive specific communications other than RSS feeds from social networks. Examples of these passive social networks are discussion groups, message boards, online selling venues (e.g., eBay. Craig's List, and the like), etc. This passivity creates a problem of how to respond to a request for participation or discussion when the user is unavailable to navigate to the site, unavailable to read the content or the RSS feed of the content. Another class of social media is active, where information comes in from the sender because the receiver has subscribed to the content. Examples of such active social media are MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.
There is an additional problem of how much information that the user wants to share with the person(s) requesting their communication and in what form to best share the information. The fact that many of these venues are public means that the user has the additional problem of posting for public consumption any replay message. Still another problem is the coordination of responses through an ever increasing number of media and venues. For example, if one responded to an email query with an Out of Office assistant, a social network response to the same person would be redundant and usurp bandwidth from the party receiving redundant Out of Office notices. When a party, in which a person frequently communicates, is out of the office, the multiple out-of-office messages can be distracting and cost a great deal of bandwidth across a large enterprise.